Washington Decoded

Christopher Nolan’s Forthcoming “Oppenheimer” Movie: A Historian's Questions, Worries, and Challenges

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By Barton J. Bernstein

 

I think we should not attempt a plan [to develop the weapon for radiological warfare] unless we can poison [enough] food to kill a half a million men.
                   J. Robert Oppenheimer to Enrico Fermi, 25 May 1943[1]

I can hardly believe my eyes when I saw a news release said to be quoting Oppenheimer, and giving the impression that there is no radiological hazard [in the A-bombed Japanese cities]. Apparently all things are relative.
                   Radiologist Dr. Robert S. Stone to Lieutenant Colonel Hymer L. Friedel[l], 9 August 1945[2]

[C]redible evidence exists which tends to show that Dr. Oppenheimer was a member of the Communist Party [in 1941] . . . This evidence [because of the source employed] is not available for use in court.
                    Assistant Attorney General Charles B. Murray to Attorney General James P. McGranery, 12 November 1952[3]

Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer said [in his speech] that he has ‘no doubts’ [that the US‘s] development of the H-bomb was the right course.[4]
                    Palo Alto Times, April 1960

The people who know nothing [about Oppenheimer] are going to get the wildest ride [in the “Oppenheimer” film]. . . they need to know, because, you know, he’s the most important man who ever lived.
                    Christopher Nolan[5]

 

    The forthcoming “Oppenheimer” film, on the once- famous J. Robert Oppenheimer, reportedly received a large budget for the 2023 movie—about $100 million for the making, and about $100 million for the marketing. Directed by Christopher Nolan, whose earlier films have reportedly grossed more than $5 billion, the movie is likely to be a blockbuster.

    Rather ironically, it is likely to rival the “Barbie” film at the box office. Some critics, undoubtedly, will discuss American culture in the framework suggested by the two very different movies. “Barbie” has multiple, and profitable, product tie-ins with various items and firms. Such could not reasonably be the case for the “Oppenheimer” film, dealing heavily, as it does, with nuclear weapons.

    A widely admired director, Christopher Nolan has won laurels for his work, and his movies are often used as models in film-making classes. His “Oppenheimer” film was voted by a Hollywood critics group as among the most awaited summer movies. It is scheduled for release on July 21. It has already been discussed in various publications, and the publicity blitz may be near. The “Oppenheimer” film is apparently in many ways a joint project by Nolan with his wife, Emma Thomas, who served as the producer. “She’s the best producer in Hollywood, without question,” according to Nolan.[6]

    Nolan’s new movie is starring the gifted Irish actor, Cillian Murphy, as physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was often described, and greatly celebrated, as “the father of the atomic bomb.” The cast includes, among others, Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, head of the A-bomb project, Robert Downey, Jr. as Lewis Strauss, an Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) chief and Oppenheimer foe, and Emily Blunt, as Kitty (Katherine) Oppenheimer, Robert’s wife. It is a distinguished cast.

    It’s revealing to read in some newspapers, as part of the Hollywood-generated publicity, of the committed preparation by the hard-working Cillian Murphy for his central role in “Oppenheimer.” Murphy stated, as the New York Times reported in Murphy’s words, “We are going into this guy’s [Oppenheimer’s] head, you have to be immersed in the essence so strongly that you carry the audience with you.”[7]

    The movie reportedly leans heavily on a major and justifiably well-respected, but sometimes also dismayingly flawed, book on the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had directed the wartime and early postwar Los Alamos laboratory, later headed the AEC’s General Advisory Committee (GAC), and became in 1947 the longtime director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.[8]

    After Oppenheimer’s impressive wartime work directing the secret Los Alamos laboratory in developing the two kinds of atomic bombs, he became, in the postwar period for a near-decade, an influential adviser on the US’s nuclear-weapons and related defense policy. Aside from the iconic Albert Einstein, Oppenheimer was probably the best known, and generally the most respected, US-based scientist.

The Riddle of Lee Harvey Oswald

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The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee
Paul R. Gregory
Diversion. 280 pp. $21.80

 

By Richard A. Reiman

 

 

    There are mysteries about the assassination of President Kennedy, but among those likely to bedevil historians a hundred years after the assassination, the endurance of just one is certain. It has nothing to do with grainy images from the Zapruder film, trajectories from the sixth- floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, or bullet shots, be they “magic” or prosaic. It is the motivation, in full, of Lee Harvey Oswald for assassinating JFK. The question suffers from an overabundance, not a paucity, of possible answers, conjoined with the portrait of a man who planned for greatness while sharing almost nothing with anyone what he was about. If, while Oswald lived, someone might have both desired and attempted to spend time with this hostile, hyper-suspicious fantasist, and possessed the wit to probe his politics or personality, the chances were overwhelming that the door, metaphorically speaking, would have been slammed in his face.

Lee & Marina Oswald

    Equally improbable would be that someone possessing these credentials would step forward for the first time after nearly sixty years, extensively and shrewdly summarizing all that he had learned.

    Enter Paul R. Gregory and The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee. Gregory’s brush with Marina and Lee occurred on the precipice of an academic career of international scope and distinction. Between earning a doctorate in economics at Harvard in 1969 and authoring this model of a restricted “life and times,” he wrote or co-wrote more than twelve books and one hundred articles on the fields of Russia’s economy and energy sector. His fluency in some of the psychodramas of Soviet history (his books include such titles as Lenin’s Brain, and Politics, Murder and Love in Stalin’s Kremlin) suggests the interesting possibility that either his later work was informed by his early acquaintance with psychosis personified, or that the subject of this book and its mysteries were retroactively illuminated by his subsequent education in the enigmatic riddles of Russia.

    Gregory was 21 years old when he met Lee Oswald in June 1962, two weeks after Oswald, recently returned from the Soviet Union, had sought the help of Paul’s father, Peter, in finding a job. The elder Gregory, that rarest of things in Cold War Fort Worth—a Russian translator—had positively evaluated Oswald’s Russian language proficiency at Oswald’s request. Interested in meeting Marina, Peter had brought Paul along to visit the couple at Robert Oswald’s home. Soon, Paul was arranging for language tutoring from Marina over the last two months of his summer hiatus from the University of Oklahoma. The Gregorys (father, mother and Paul) also hosted a dinner for the Oswalds on August 25, attended by two Russian émigrés from Dallas, George Bouhe and Anna Meller. Aside from these contacts, Paul met the Oswalds only one more time: on November 22, 1962, when he drove them to a bus stop back to Dallas from their Thanksgiving family reunion with Lee’s brother and half-brother, one year to the day before the assassination.

Reality Check

 

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Thinking Critically about the Kennedy Assassination: Debunking the Myths and Conspiracy Theories
Michel Jacques Gagné
Routledge. 508 pp. $29.95

 

By Martin J. Kelly Jr.

 

    In a world of sensible analysis there is an inverse relationship between analytic knowledge and unwarranted suspicion. The more we understand how the real world actually materializes in our daily lives, the less likely are we to imagine nefarious puppeteers behind the scenes. But now we are in a paranoia-laden culture that finds it easy to assert that the murder of twenty children was faked by the government, or that the Israeli Defense Force trains NYC police officers to deliver violence to innocent US citizens. These days political passion intensifies conspiracy claims and inoculates believers against embarrassment and refutation.

    Fringe ideas have always been noisy in America. In the ‘30s, a rash of outré notions marched into the Depression spotlight to capture the imagination of the disaffected. Utopian criticism from the thrusts of Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin and William Dudley Pelley, for example, created deep mistrust of traditional thinking and government. Some of the movements were basted in anti-Semitism and proto-Nazism at the same time as Adolf Hitler became living myth to German volk. America was able to shrug off these radical forces because in the throes of the Depression mainstream politics and media gave them very little breathing room. In the long run, their effect on the electorate was puny.

    After the tumultuous ‘60s, America’s courting of half-baked ideas was quickened by an emerging and powerful popular culture teeming with salient facts unleavened by deliberative analysis. In its “now for something completely new” insistence on breadth against depth, the ubiquity of electronic media is part of the genome of the surge in unexamined thinking. All ideas were (are) of equal force. As a generalization, the conspiracy theory (CT) “take” on the assassination of JFK in 1963 is a hard-core historical element in the unwitting pursuit of “at-large” mythic ideas in the country—the death of a president is mainstream by definition. That the murder was investigated by two different government initiatives in 1964 and 1977-78, solidifies its genetic importance for American suspicion along with several zany notions that come with it in the pop culture.

    Michel Jacques Gagné’s Thinking Critically is a richly-detailed antidote to JFK conspiracy thought. He submits JFK CT thinking to direct tests against reality. It is impossible to praise this book too much or to capture its power in a few words. The result of decades of research and five yearsof writing, Thinking Critically is a textured and thoughtful treatment of many of the major conspiracy themes surrounding JFK’s murder. While he asserts the analysis is not an exercise in formal logic, Gagné does pick out some hackneyed fallacies in the JFK CT literature like sic hoc ergo propter hoc and “lack of evidence indicates a successful cover-up.” And he includes types of fallacies and formal argument in two very useful appendices.

    The entire book is somewhat discursive, i.e., moves coherently from topic to topic without attempting to glue together the JFK CT movement into a univocal conceptual package. The soul of the book is in its conceptually savvy treatment of crucial features in the JFK CT tradition through a sound hearing of full evidence in each analysis. Just about all of the CT cognitive artifices that have distorted the murder for decades collapse under the weight of their own jerry-rigged density and the force of the evidence Gagné examines. The analysis demonstrates most CT facts to be “factoids” and conspiracy scenarios to be filled with fundamental contradictions. Not one conspiracy claim survives the established facts.

    Thinking Critically intimates that the JFK Camelot myth had ignited energetically from Jacqueline Kennedy’s PR fantasies about her dead husband into a full-fisted Arthurian political and moral depiction of JFK by CT writers. JFK became a peace-loving universal ultra-liberal whose loving kindness and superior moral stance made him the target of hateful intolerance from his own colleagues in government. In such a Romantic milieu, every citizen with an inclination toward reading conspiracy into his murder was possessed by unstoppable passion.

False and mendacious allegations of a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy persist nearly 59 years later despite multiple investigations.

    Gagné suggests that JFK’s death was felt as an end to liberal hope so that a wellspring of  desperation kept the conspiracy alive in a segment of the population. As time went on, then,  the original Warren Commission and its defenders become historical villains in the vision of  the CT community.

    We learn that Oswald was not the mild-mannered cipher lionized in CT writings. Oswald’s  story is checkered and problematic. While there is a psychiatric history of him in 1953 when he  was in the New York city public school system, Gagné’s analysis relies mostly on more  accessible facts rather than on technical psychological observations. Anyone can support these  quotidian facts with the professional psychiatric examination on the record. Oswald was filled  with fantasies of omnipotence and violence as part of his personality disorder.

    Crucial physical evidence such as ballistics, forensics, X-rays and photos, and the Zapruder  film are ratified again and again by straightforward exposition. All claims of these elements  having been forged or altered by Dallas Police, FBI, military doctors, secret X-ray or film labs  are shown not only to be groundless but also to be impossible in 1963. The backyard photos,  the autopsy report with X-rays and photos, the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle and the single bullet,  the fragments from JFK’s skull and Governor Connally’s body, etc., are indelibly certified by a  cold look at the brute facts of the case.

    All of the standard CT claims, baroque and mundane, are shredded in Thinking Critically by  a sane study of basic facts and evidence. Grassy Knoll and man-hole snipers, as well as Oswald  impersonators and KGB operations explode under rational scrutiny. Icons of the conspiracy  movement evaporate as well under the epistemic ridicule brilliantly wielded by Professor  Gagné. We learn not only that Nixon, LBJ, CIA, the mafia and the Pentagon, etc. had no hand  in JFK’s murder but also that major CT public figures were less than competent with the  primary empirical findings in the case. Mark Lane, David Lifton, Gary Aguilar, David Mantik and even Roger Stone, to name a few, are stripped of their New Clothes.

    Lifton believes JFK’s body was switched and altered at autopsy. Gagné shows the clear impossibility of such a maneuver. Mantik, who has a PhD in physics and an MD, insists the x-rays were altered to make JFK’s front skull entry wound look like an exit wound. While Gagné demonstrates how Mantik, a radiologist, has rotated an X-ray improperly to make his claim, he doesn’t indict the doctor for other technically unsound CT research on JFK’s skull X-ray that catapulted Mantik stage-front in the CT movement a few decades back. A bit bumbling and a little paranoid are some of these CT thinkers despite their PhD’s and MD’s. To see these notions and their proposers unmasked as Gagné punches up the validity of foundational facts is an epiphany for the reader.

    Thinking Critically is a beautiful and indispensable contribution to public sanity in an age of tabloid concepts. It shows unequivocally that, in the decades since 1963, only an evidence-free paranoid suspicion has characterized the conspiracy community’s long Sumo-grapple with the reality of the JFK case. Everyone should read the book and be deeply grateful.

Martin J. Kelly Jr., a  Professor Emeritus of Psychology who also taught History of Science, is a frequent contributor to Washington Decoded.

©2022 by Martin J. Kelly Jr.

A Single Photograph Disproves Oliver Stone’s Conspiracy Claim

 

The Unfounded Attack on CE 399’s Chain of Custody

 

 

By Steve Roe

 

 

    Some people, when they are responsible for creating a disaster, apologize and slink away. Others attempt to make amends. A few double down.

    Oliver Stone’s new pseudo-documentary, JFK: Destiny Betrayed, proves the nothing-if-not indefatigable director belongs firmly to the double-down school. He first unveiled his conspiratorial take on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy in JFK, a 1991 feature film. At that time he proclaimed the film ought to be accorded as much weight as the Warren Report. Now Stone declares that his “conspiracy theories are now conspiracy facts.”[1]

    One of the outlandish claims in JFK: Destiny Betrayed concerns a most important piece of ballistic evidence. This artifact is Warren Commission Exhibit (CE) 399, the spent bullet fired from Lee Harvey Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle to the exclusion of all other weapons. This bullet, after penetrating the president’s upper back and exiting his throat, traversed Texas Governor John Connally’s torso and wrist before lodging itself superficially in his left thigh. During the chaos at Parkland Hospital, the bullet fell out onto the stretcher cart being used to transport Connally to the operating room. Within an hour or so a Parkland employee noticed the bullet on the stretcher, and it was eventually handed over to a Secret Service agent before finally reaching the FBI Lab on the evening of November 22nd.

Above: A frame from the Zapruder film shows President Kennedy and Governor Connally an instant after they were struck by the second bullet fired.                                         

Below: CE 399, the second bullet fired by Lee Harvey Oswald.                                                                                                                .                                                                                              

    Stone and James DiEugenio, who wrote the screenplay, would have everyone believe, however, that CE 399’s provenance can be impeached, and that unnamed conspirators planted a key piece of evidence that was the focus of every federal investigation. As Stone asserted during a March interview with an all-too-credulous Boston Herald reporter, “Nothing matches. There’s no chain of custody—of a bullet [CE 399] or a rifle or fingerprints. Nothing was done right. It was a completely botched investigation . . . .[2]

    In point of fact, there is no chain of custody issue. The Warren Commission worked hard in 1964 to establish how CE 399 got from Parkland to the FBI Lab on the night of November 22nd. The House Select Committee on Assassinations corroborated the accuracy of the commission’s findings in the late 1970s. The Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) reaffirmed these findings in 1996. And most recently, the National Archives (NARA), which preserves all assassination artifacts, acted in concert with the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to employ state-of-art imaging that enables researchers to examine CE 399 as never before.

    The issue comes down to whom do you believe: Oliver Stone? Or your own eyes?